Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,207

What’s his name?’

No, missus, he didn’t know the name – those two boys that work for the baas on the farm, now. Could he please see those boys? They were (in an inspiration, they had suddenly become) his wife’s cousins.

Now the white missus smiled sympathetically. ‘Oh those. No, they don’t work here any more. They’ve gone. My husband has finished with the building, he didn’t need them any longer.’

Gone?

He knew it was no use asking where. When black people leave a white man’s place, they’ve gone, that’s all; it’s not the white man’s business to know where they’ll find work next. Then he had another sudden idea, and again he saw in her face she knew it as soon as he did. ‘Does the baas need a boy for the farm? Me, I’m old Baas Kleynhans’s boy, I’m work here before, long time.’

She was smiling refusal while he pleaded. ‘No, no, I’m sorry. We don’t need anyone. My husband’s got someone coming – next month, yes, from another farm, his brother’s farm—’

They knew exactly how to lie to each other, standing in the yard in which she was the newcomer and he the old inhabitant.

She said it again: she was sorry . . . And this gave him the courage of an opening.

‘When I’m here before – after Oubaas Kleynhans he’s die, I’m look after this place. Those mealies’ (he pointed behind him) ‘I’m plant them. And then the other baas he say I must go. Now those boy – your boy – I’m tell them it’s my mealies and they say they can ask you, I can come for those mealies.’

‘Oh the mealie patch? No, I don’t know anything about that. But there are no mealies yet—’ Both her hands turned palm up in smiling patronage.

‘Not now. But when the mealies they’re coming ready, that boy he’s say he going ask you—’

‘You can have the mealies.’

He grinned with nervous disbelief at the ease of his success. ‘The baas he won’t chase me?’

She must be one of those young white women who tell their men what they must do. She was sure: ‘The baas won’t chase you.’

‘When the missus and the baas like to eat some of those mealies, when they coming still green, the missus must take.’

‘Yes, thank you.’ And then, the usual phrase from white people, who are always in a hurry to get things over, who don’t seem to know or take any pleasure in the lingering disengagement that politely concludes a discussion: ‘All right, then, eh?’ And she was gone, back into the kitchen, while, since he hadn’t been chased away, he took this as the permission he hadn’t asked for – to go through the white people’s property to look at his mealies.

Charles and Joy kept checking on whether the bicycle was still there, behind the shed. Half an hour later it was gone, and so must he be, although they had missed witnessing him ride away.

Charles heated up the coffee. He had not appeared before the man; the man would not be able to describe the baas, only the missus and the two boys who had worked for them. Joy blew on her cup. ‘I really think he’s harmless.’

But that was exactly what made him suspect – his humble pretext for having kept an eye on them for weeks, now, his innocent reason for trying to find out where Eddie and Vusi were: perfect opportunities for someone in plainclothes to have picked up a poor farm labourer out of work and offered him a few rands simply in return for telling what and whom he saw on a farm where nothing was growing but his trespassing patch of mealies.

‘And if I had chased him away?’

‘That’d’ve been much worse. For Pete’s sake!’

Once approved, she had natural grounds for pointing out her forethought. ‘I told him someone else was coming to work for us, but only next month. To hold him off and at the same time make the set-up not seem too unnatural.’

Charles opened his hands stiffly, doubtingly, and then made fists of them under his bearded jaw again. ‘Next month.’ That part of the proposition was good enough. The day after you have left a country it will be as remote, as a physical environment in which you may be apprehended, as it will be in a year. Next month would be no more able to reach them than the time, months ahead, when the mealies would be ready for eating. ‘But now he’ll